A Curious Class of Adpositional Multiword Expressions in Korean

2026-02-17

AI Summary

This study addresses the longstanding lack of systematic research on Korean multiword expressions (MWEs) within cross-linguistic annotation frameworks, particularly focusing on multiword adpositional constructions. Centering on Korean postpositional verb constructions (PVCs), the work leverages Wikipedia corpora and linguistic contrastive analysis to clearly delineate PVCs from non-MWE forms and light verb constructions (LVCs). It proposes the first comprehensive annotation guidelines specifically designed for Korean PVCs, identifying and categorizing multiple PVC types. The resulting annotation scheme is structured to be extensible to multilingual MWE frameworks, thereby filling a critical gap in cross-linguistic MWE research by providing much-needed Korean linguistic resources.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Lexical Semantics and Morphology
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Conversational Systems for Recommendation & Retrieval
• Machine Learning: Large Multimodal Models (LMMs)

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Mining multimedia, multimodal, multilingual, cross-lingual Web data
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Multilingual and cross-lingual Web search
• Semantics and Knowledge: Representation, semantic annotation, enhancement, enrichments, access and/or integration of a variety of data on the Web

Abstract

Multiword expressions (MWEs) have been widely studied in cross-lingual annotation frameworks such as PARSEME. However, Korean MWEs remain underrepresented in these efforts. In particular, Korean multiword adpositions lack systematic analysis, annotated resources, and integration into existing multilingual frameworks. In this paper, we study a class of Korean functional multiword expressions: postpositional verb-based constructions (PVCs). Using data from Korean Wikipedia, we survey and analyze several PVC expressions and contrast them with non-MWEs and light verb constructions (LVCs) with similar structure. Building on this analysis, we propose annotation guidelines designed to support future work in Korean multiword adpositions and facilitate alignment with cross-lingual frameworks.

Problem

• multiword expressions
• Korean
• adpositions
• annotation
• cross-lingual

Innovation

• Korean multiword expressions
• postpositional verb-based constructions
• annotation guidelines
• cross-lingual alignment
• PARSEME